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A hundred UK companies sign up for four-day week with no loss of pay

398 points by nigerian1981 4y ago

shadowfoxx 4y ago
I think some industries are going to be "better suited" to this than others. But it doesn't have to be that way. If we could shift ever so slightly away from "Biggest Number at end of year - bigger than last years number - at all costs" we could increase staff by just a little bit and move just about any industry to 4 or even 3 day work week. This and worker-cooperative-businesses. I've yet to hear a legitimately compelling argument against, especially when we see the results. (I mean, the arguments are typically, "They have problems, too!" and "Bob Votes to be CEO") Theory is great but how can you hold onto the theory when the experimental data is at least promising?
- williamtrask 4y ago
  I imagine the main argument has to do with having enough surplus to innovate. That said of course there’s plenty of times where surplus doesn’t go to innovation.
  - shadowfoxx 4y ago
    The fact that a company has profit at all means there is surplus. They mean the same thing. as a side note; "Innovation" in my view is not a reason in and of itself to do something. Its too nebulous a term to have real meaning. Like - how much innovating are 7-11's doing or most other commercial shops? Would that money be better spent elsewhere? What percentage of 'innovations' actually fail vs those that prove worth it? etc etc.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  > If we could shift ever so slightly away from "Biggest Number at end of year - bigger than last years number - at all costs" we could increase staff by just a little bit and move just about any industry to 4 or even 3 day work week. The problem with this approach is buyers are looking for the lowest price, so it requires efforts on the national government scale (or multiple national governments, even significantly all of them) to put a floor on this lowest price. Otherwise you will get outcompeted by someone able to obtain/perform labor for cheaper.
  - shadowfoxx 4y ago
    I'm not sure I understand who the parties are in your example. Who are the buyers? (Employers? People buying your product?) How does any business not get outcompeted by a race to the bottom where people are always willing to perform/obtain the labor more cheaply? Why do the costs of goods get more expensive every year? If our system is so dysfunctional it can't give an inch towards the quality of life of the people living under it. Burn it to the ground, I say. We used to say the Divine Right of Kings was the best we could do.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Buyers are anyone buying goods and services, from people who vote for politicians that promise lower taxes due to negotiating more labor hours per dollar, or someone going to Walmart and buying a $10 shirt from Bangladesh over a $20 US made shirt (made up numbers). People who buy from McDonalds over the local burger place that is more that twice as expensive. >How does any business not get outcompeted by a race to the bottom where people are always willing to perform/obtain the labor more cheaply? They do get outcompeted, hence manufacturing and textile businesses moving to other parts of the world from US/UK/Europe. And people opting to shop at large businesses with economies of scale like Walmart and Aldi over mom and pop places. >Why do the costs of goods get more expensive every year? The cost of some goods gets more expensive. A lot of consumer goods went down in price for people in US/UK/Europe for many of the post WW2 decades. It is only recently that labor costs might have started pushing prices up in real terms.
      - shadowfoxx 4y ago
        I think we're still using "Biggest number profit, bigger than last-year number at all cost" thinking here. Because from my understanding and using some of the language you're using - Costs are going up "Due to labor costs going up" but these same companies are showing record profits. So it seems to me that there's room for the cost of labor to go up without increasing prices, necessarily. But the idea that companies Profit a little less - and I will never let anyone forget that profit is excess - is unfathomable to some.
- VLM 4y ago
  My actual experience with 4 day work is the closer the team is to operations (2nd and 3rd shift 7 days per week) and the closer to contractor/consultants the easier the transition. I would caution people to be careful what they wish for; my longest 4-day gig involved sun-wed and wed-sat shifts. 4-day doesn't necessarily mean mon-thr ever week for everyone. Another problem was our overlap day was wed thus "wednesday is non productive its for meetings and stuff" so you really only worked three days because you couldn't trust not to be interrupted on wednesday. Its probably of enormous productivity value to move all interruptions to exactly one day every week, however you don't need 4-day to do that, technically speaking. Another oddity probably of more interest to bean counters is our overlap day was wednesday so with all hands on deck we did maint and rollouts and upgrades on wednesday, but the rest of the world did maintenance windows on the weekend at 2am so our meaningless measure of fake uptime was lower than non-4day companies. Now does your employer value rolling out better stuff faster, or do they value a "better" meaningless heavily gamed number? So 4-day might be better or worse depending on if your local management lives in reality or spreadsheet-metric-land. "Oh no how will we get fake nine nines of uptime if we roll out new SaaS on Wednesdays?"
retrac98 4y ago
I never really understood the push for a 4 day work week here. As things stand, part time work seems really common in the UK anyway. Loads of people I know work 2-4 days per week for a variety of reasons. There's no stigma. It's already pretty normal?
- dtagames 4y ago
  The keyword here is "no loss of pay." These people will work 4 days a week for their previous 5-day salary.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    But perhaps pay rises will stagnate and they'll gradually not be competitive with 5-day companies at full pay. Edit: Oh, it's started already, from the article: > "With many businesses struggling to afford 10% inflation pay rises, we're starting to see increasing evidence that a four-day week with no loss of pay is being offered as an alternative solution."
    - ksec 4y ago
      Yes, with inflation and stagnant wage growth ( even before the pandemic ) I think and hope the 4 days work solution will push for increase in productivity per working hours. Unfortunately not every industry is suited for 4 days work. But May be UK should start with Civil Servant?
- nigerian1981 4y ago
  Work life balance
  - LightG 4y ago
    You've been downvoted but, in simplicity, that is the message and what employees want now. Employers/managers, listen up. It's worth emphasising beause many bosses still haven't got this message. I'm currently quiet-quitting, and will actually-quit shortly, because of this attitude. It's not about being work-shy. It's about busting your arse for a company (and self/respect) and then when the realisation dawns on everyone that flexibility is not only possible but has helped productivity (n=1 our productivity and balance sheet improved during covid), and then to have the door shut on that realisation ... you can expect employees to switch off. Our entire team feels this way. We'll all be gone soon. /rant
hunglee2 4y ago
Some progressive stuff coming out of the UK; there isn't much of it, as political chaos unleashed by Brexit remains all consuming for the party that runs the country, but this experiment was the largest of its type, and so far, looks a great success. Remains to be seen whether firms who make this commitment will be able to outcompete traditional '5-day-ers' in a recessionary environment, you hope they will but that will be the big test
spoonjim 4y ago
This will only work if the labor laws allow for easy firing. The 4-day week at a regular market salary will be very attractive and will attract top performers as long as the company has the flexibility to remove the underperformers.
- Moissanite 4y ago
  Getting rid of underperformers in regular private sector roles in the UK isn't really that bad; certainly closer to Germany than the US, but on the whole about right. Public sector is another matter; getting rid of dead weight in the civil service is a tough problem and suppresses the salaries of other employees there, leading to a downward spiral.
  - maccard 4y ago
    > Getting rid of underperformers in regular private sector roles in the UK isn't really that bad; certainly closer to Germany than the US, but on the whole about right <...> Public sector is another matter The uk has practically no employment rights when you have less than 2 years service. One of the (many) articles on the subject [0]. The employment rights in the public sector are similar, with most of the "unfireable" aspect being people who have been there long enough that it's easier to move them around than it is to get rid of them. The civil service in the UK has an unreasonably long probationary period (9 months) which if people actually cared about removing unproductive employees could be much better applied. [0] https://www.davidsonmorris.com/dismissing-an-employee-with-less-than-2-years-service/ https://www.davidsonmorris.com/dismissing-an-employee-with-l...
Reason077 4y ago
From a macroeconomic perspective, this doesn’t seem like the best time to be trying this sort of thing. We already have a labour shortage and a lot of inflationary pressure! If we had high productivity, high unemployment, and low inflation, then introducing a 4 day week would be a great solution.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  This is the best time to try it. Labor has all the power, and will into the future due to structural demographics. For capital, it never seems to be a good time to try anything that doesn’t allow for maximum extraction or any semblance of labor power or quality of life improvements. For example, US railroad workers are about to strike because they dare ask for paid sick leave. It’ll cost $2B/day to the US economy, not because of unreasonable demands (paid sick leave!), but because of unreasonable management and shareholders. Edit: (can’t reply, HN throttling) Good luck attempting to solve for labor power with immigration. Folks who lean right (and a cohort of centrists) don’t want it, and they still have enough voting power to be somewhat relevant for the next 5-10 years (in the US, the UK, and many parts of Europe; Italy’s most recent elections showcase this), as electorate turnover takes time, not to mention declining fertility rates everywhere squeezing the young, productive cohort globally. https://www.npr.org/2022/11/21/1137640529/railroads-freight-rail-unions-vote-contract-strike https://www.npr.org/2022/11/21/1137640529/railroads-freight-...
  - mantas 4y ago
    Capital will just push for ever bigger immigration to counter labour.
    - Jensson 4y ago
      How? Labour has all the voting power, capital only wins if they can manipulate labour to vote against its own interests like they managed in USA.
      - mantas 4y ago
Moissanite 4y ago
The key to this in my view is having it be an officially "approved" option. Working at a FAANG company in the UK, I could already afford to take a 20% pay cut and work a 4 day week. I would love to do so in fact - but since that working pattern is relatively uncommon, I don't have the confidence that colleagues would respect or acknowledge it - basically I see myself spending an excessive amount of time telling people that I am not available on Friday for that meeting, and no I won't make an exception just for this week. Or, I would make an exception and get sucked into work - and now the company is getting 20% of my time for free. If a 4-day week was more widespread, I would have more confidence in maintaining it - and on the odd occasion I have to work the extra day, I wouldn't feel so bad given the 100% pay model described here.
- benjiweber 4y ago
  Do people ask you to make an exception and attend meetings when you have a Friday booked off from your holiday allowance? What would be different if you have it booked off for working pattern?
  - Moissanite 4y ago
    Not unheard of, but also I do think it would be different - everyone knows holiday time is limited, which feels different to having an unusually long weekend every week. It shouldn't, and maybe I am overly concerned by the impact this would have - but I would still be much more comfortable with the idea if it is at least available org-wide rather than by exception only.
    - logifail 4y ago
      > I do think it would be different Q: If a cow-orker isn't at work on a given day, for whatever reason (sickness, holiday, part-timer), why would one expect to be able to contact them?
      - Moissanite 4y ago
        This sends us off on a tangent about communication techniques, and specifically the down-sides of Slack. I personally try to use it like a richer email system (i.e. asynchronously as much as possible) but you always get the odd person who insists on "hello are you there" as their opening message.
agsamek 4y ago
I live in Poland. We are recently being recognized as a developed economy most often. Still, we earn 1/3 in dollar terms per Capita compared to the US or Germany. I think 4 days week would result in people having two jobs regularly. I wonder if the situation is simalar with basic job workers in more advanced economies. One interesing point is that people in my IT company were willing to put 5-10% of their income in exchange for work from home. But this is IT. I think that the right way to go is not to reduce the number of hours but just allow people to work 4 days per week with hourly rate intact. This might be a very welcomed option by many people. Also - signing up for this in the high inflation time might work well instead of raising compensations. So this is a good time to carry such experiments.
- varispeed 4y ago
  > were willing to put 5-10% of their income in exchange for work from home. Why? The company is going to use your home as an office and they should be paying that 5-10% extra. Why business paying corporate landlord for office space is okay, but when Joe Public offers his own lowly place then it's a no no? When people don't recognise their value, they are prime for being exploited.
  - bluesign 4y ago
    There is no inherit value, it is determined by market, mostly supply and demand.
    - zach_garwood 4y ago
      Maybe you folks don't have to pay property taxes, but in the US we do, and that's a pretty clear indication of an "inherent value".
      - bluesign 4y ago
        Sorry if it was not clear, I meant value of work.
    - deleted 4y ago
varispeed 4y ago
The UK wages are laughably low, so these corporations are doing no favours. The still enjoy record profits and their board members probably laugh that serfs even think that these corporations are being so "generous".
- yellow_lead 4y ago
  Genuine question though - isn't there some tradeoff for this like labor benefits (vacation, healthcare, etc)?
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    If you had 25 days of PTO per year before, I would view having 20 days per year as the equivalent, but others will no doubt disagree.
  - youngtaff 4y ago
    Earlier this year I went from a 5 day week to 4 days spread over 5 with no loss of PTO / benefits etc. Some people were already on a 4 day week and they were essentially given a 25% pay rise instead
  - VLM 4y ago
    I've worked a couple places like this and the real argument is "thanksgiving in the USA is always a thursday which is unfair to the wed-sat team" if they're forced to work or "unfair to the sun-wed team" if they wanted to work for triple overtime holiday pay and similar arguments about election day always being a Tuesday there are five federal holidays IIRC that are off on Mondays but no federal holidays on fri or sat, etc. Usually whining problems were solved by "this system has been here since your grandparents and you signed up for it so suck it up or transfer teams or quit" Technically the system was only there for their grandparents in operations and finance always worked 9-5 m-f until thirty years ago so it is new out of operations, but whatever. The vacation problem was solved by providing "weeks" to everyone along with the interesting legal fiction that everyone worked ten hours so our "weeks" were implemented using "hours". So new employees got "two weeks" which on paper were implemented as 80 hours. These are all very old issues in 24x7 operations environments including outside IT/tech/computer-stuff. The only "innovation" is when the payroll clerk starts doing 4x10s like she's a front line nurse, or the graphics artist in marketing starts doing 4x10s 3rd shift like he's a field service tech.
neets 4y ago
Currency collapses a bit and the government plans to print money to subsidize 4 day work week. The world sounds more and more like a Ayn Rand novel by the day.
upmostly 4y ago
There are likely several hundreds, if not thousands of companies already offering a 4-day work week or something similar. For example, I work at a company called Forestreet (https://forestreet.com https://forestreet.com) and we already offer a 9-day fortnight. The idea is that you condense your work week into 9 days, and take the 10th day off. There are pros and cons to this model, but overall it's working very well.
- 5555624 4y ago
  We've had that "9-day fortnight" for years. Initially, it was slow to catch on, as the "10th day" was Wednesday. Once it was changed so that employees could pick the day, most people picked Monday or Friday. An added "bonus": It all but eliminated meetings on Mondays and Fridays, as there were always some people out on those days. On Sundays, you don't need to worry about a meeting the next day; on Friday, you can catch up on stuff.
ITB 4y ago
Just what we need to fight global inflation.
coding123 4y ago
So instead of developers working 3 hours a day for 4 days, they work 3 hours a day for 3 days. Because Thursday become the new Friday, which was already an "off" day.
coding123 4y ago
Has anyone else noticed that after the layoffs most of these articles have been vanishing lately.
pessimizer 4y ago
I've loved the idea of moving to an 8 day week, where two 4-day a week people share the same 7-day a week job, and use the surplus day to coordinate with each other or work on tasks that would be better with two.
poszlem 4y ago
I expect to be downvoted for saying this, as some people are really precious about the idea of 4-day work week, but I really struggle to understand how working fewer hours will not result in loss of productivity. If for some reason it is true that working 4 days a week results in the same amount of productivity, then why are 3 days a week not even more productive? Or 2? This is obviously reductio ad absurdum but that would mean that people who work 0 hours are the most productive ones. I know that there is the argument about "if I have fewer hours they will be more focused", but that to me sounds like it's entirely wishful thinking and in a few years will be having the same amount of wasted hours in those days too, as people start thinking of Thursday as the new Friday. I assume there is some sort of middle ground between working too much and working too little. Are there any actual evidence that that optimum middle ground is 4 days and not 3, or 5? I would find the whole idea much more palatable if it wasn't sold by claiming something likely isn't true (people working fewer hours do more work), and instead someone was honest and admitted that this is a political project. What I find much more interesting is switching from a 7 day week to something else entirely, for example working on: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday is free, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday is free. I can see how that might result in people being more productive, as they still work the same amount of hours, but they don't get as exhausted as before.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  We need to do experiments and gather data to test hypothesis. This is one of those experiments.
- adamckay 4y ago
  The no loss of productivity can be a combination of multiple things: a) There is loss in productivity but it isn't (or can't be) properly measured or does not make an impact on the business, e.g. a help desk responds to customers with 1 business day rather than 4 business hours. b) People are more motivated (including it being a novelty) so employees are eager to work harder in their reduced hours to ensure they can continue a 4-day working week. If this becomes the norm after a while you may see this slack off. c) Lots of people are doing busy-work or "bullshit tasks" which do not actually affect business productivity or are simply just looking busy and procrastinating, e.g. office workers browsing Twitter, Reddit or HN for a short time every couple of hours which is eliminated. It highlights saying "don't confuse activity with achievement/productivity".
Silverback_VII 4y ago
The corporate insects will just suck out your life energy in four days instead of five so that you need three days of recovery instead of two.
mattkevan 4y ago
At a place I used to work for, the four day week question was put to the CEO at an all-hands company town hall. Not a fan of the idea, he scoffed and said something like, ‘I pay you to be at your desk from 9am-5.30pm Monday-Friday. Why should I pay you the same for a day less?’ I don’t think he realised it at the time, but that answer was devastating to company productivity and morale. He’d just demonstrated to everyone that he didn’t value results and all that was important was bums on seats. People stopped putting in extra effort, waited out their hours as that was all that was required and started brushing up their CVs. I left not long after and so did many others.
- galoisscobi 4y ago
  The director for the org I work in says something along those lines after every release cycle. He thanks everyone for working long hours and on burning the midnight oil on weekends, and that’s it. I personally never work long hours or work on weekends and those speeches feel alienating. I think hard during the day, strive to be creative and then go back to my life outside work without donating my free hours to a company that would be just fine without them. I’ve heard that what we appreciate in people also tells a lot about us and when I hear my director only acknowledge the long hours, I realize that only the long hours are appreciated. Luckily my immediate management chain knows better and understand the importance of creativity, meaningful output and WLB that I stick around.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >I left not long after and so did many others. The question from me is, did you manage to move to a company where you got paid the same or more, but for "a day less hours"? Employers can make that claim if the job market is in their favor, i.e. if most other companies agree with them and decide that they need staff available Mo-Fr 9-5 or for less hours but also for proportionally less salary, which to my experience is most employers. To normalize this, we need the majority of employers (>51% of them) to switch to paying market rate for less hours, putting pressure on the rest that this is the new norm, but I haven't seen that yet in my EU country, except for a notable couple of companies that made headlines, out of which one recently filed for bankruptcy. So as long as only a tiny minority of companies are doing this, the norm will not change. All businesses here think like your ex-boss: 'Why should I pay you the same for a day less?’ and the market favors their approach as they have seen no mass resignations since they all can afford to act like this. Therefore, the only solution would be the same as the one that lead to the 8 hour workweek being normalized almost 100 years ago: mass strikes and labor movements followed by government regulations that makes the 4 day workweek the new norm for everyone.
theptip 4y ago
> They argue that a four-day week would drive companies to improve their productivity, meaning they can create the same output using fewer hours. The idea that there is a population-wide 25% productivity boost just lying unnoticed on the sidewalk sounds asinine to me. Strong claims require strong evidence and I don’t see it. That said, I have worked a 4-day week before and it was great, but I took a proportional pay cut and wasn’t expected to somehow become super-productive. Some more charitable interpretations of why this approach might be great: * We can afford to take the pay cut and would be happier (and perhaps a little more productive) working fewer hours; * Companies with a 50-60 hour work week might have pervasive burnout and therefore get a substantial performance boost by decreasing their workload by 20%, with “4-day workweek” being a better coordination point than “only work 9-5”; * Optionality will be a good perk for employees allowing the small number of companies deploying this to get better employees (this doesn’t work if 4-day is widely adopted).
- lmm 4y ago
  > The idea that there is a population-wide 25% productivity boost just lying unnoticed on the sidewalk sounds asinine to me. Strong claims require strong evidence and I don’t see it. When the UK went on a 3-day week during the '70s, production was 96% of normal. The idea that people are being actually productive for 40 hours/week sounds pretty absurd to me.
  - theptip 4y ago
    Citation? What was the context? And why did they go back if they were actually not getting more productivity? > The idea that people are being actually productive for 40 hours/week sounds pretty absurd to me The alternative is surely far more absurd. Employees could be working 3 day weeks and producing just as much, and somehow nobody noticed? There exist employee-owned co-ops, and employee-owned startups. If there was an equal-productivity yet far more enjoyable way of working, these companies would be stealing all the best workers. The absence of any evidence of these companies existence is strong evidence that no such effect exists. Indeed the evidence points in the opposite direction; there are plenty of examples of scrappy small companies putting in crazy hours and getting loads done. I have experienced this first hand, and pick any successful startup and you’re likely to find evidence of positive marginal productivity beyond 40h/week. The objective research I’ve seen on the subject points to net-zero marginal productivity around 55-60h/week, WAY higher than the 40 you are claiming: https://docs.iza.org/dp8129.pdf https://docs.iza.org/dp8129.pdf
rose_ann_ 4y ago
I think more companies should sign up for this. It would really help the employees. Others might say it's just one added day to the days of rest you have. But an additional day can go a long way.
bArray 4y ago
You're being sold "work less hours, get paid the same". In actual fact: > “With many businesses struggling to afford 10% inflation pay rises, we’re starting to see increasing evidence that a four-day week with no loss of pay is being offered as an alternative solution.” When compared to inflation, you'll get paid less. It says 10%, but wages have been frozen for years. Worse still, you will still be expected to achieve the same amount in less time. The only difference is that they will expect your most productive hours without also paying for your less productive hours. _You_ may be in a position to take a 20% pay cut, but as they mention, they want this to become the norm for everybody. As the cost of living increases less and less will be in this position.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  >It says 10%, but wages have been frozen for years // And, in UK at least, we have more billionaires and an ever increasing wealth gap .. we've got more efficient production than ever it's just that the wealthy are taking all the benefit. That's only going to get worse; we act now or workers will have too little money to mount any sort of opposition.
ggm 4y ago
Australian standard working day is 37.5 hours. What is this 40 hours of which you speak?
- methodical 4y ago
  Australians work 37.5 hours out of the 24 hours in a day regularly? What an incredible display of work ethic. On a less sarcastic note off of your typo, in the US and presumably UK, the regular work week is 9-5 M-F which translates into 40 hour work weeks.
  - leni536 4y ago
    9-5 with a .5 hour lunch break comes out 37.5 hours.
whywhywhydude 4y ago
At the startup that I work at the biggest complaint from customers is no 24 hour support, but my company doesn’t want people to work on weekends or work overnight. Doesn’t four hour week mean even less support? You’d have to deal with crappy AI - automated bots with canned response, awful self checkouts at groceries and restaurants, waiting even longer at DMV for an appointment, etc.
- mietek 4y ago
  Hire more people.
- Philip-J-Fry 4y ago
  Why doesn't your company want people to work on weekends or overnight? Hire some people to do it, those who want to will apply. Some people would rather work on weekends and have days off in the week. Some people are night owls who would prefer to work overnight. No other 24/7 company with good compensation struggles to hire for these jobs.
joeman1000 4y ago
This is ‘shrinkflation’, but for worker-hours. Like when you buy some potato chips and the packet is smaller, but you pay the same price as before.
kranke155 4y ago
Even a single 4 day week a month is a huge bonus for most people I’d say.
mkl95 4y ago
At my previous place we did half day Fridays. But there was MASSIVE overtime from Monday to Thursday. I don't want a four-day week where I'm expected to "compensate" by working for free. Companies should stop bullshitting their employees before offering a four-day week.
kryogen1c 4y ago
In the US nuclear navy, the power plants have to be manned 24 hours a day both operating and shutdown. Ships in maintenance periods also generally go through a phase where ship personnel have to support maintenance work around the clock. Additionally, some parts of the training pipeline are run 24 hours a day. I say all that to say that while I am not a subject matter expert, I have a significantly above average amount of experience working various types of rotating shift work as well as duty rotations (a duty rotation is working 24 hours every 2, 3, 4, or 5 days depending on available manpower. Yes, you read that right - for a month, I was at work 28 to 32 out of every 48 hours). Forget 4 8 hour days, I would work 4 10 hour days right now in a heartbeat with no discussion or regrets. 1) it is invaluable to have a normal working day where you can do tasks - change your oil, get your haircut, go grocery shopping without a crowd, see a matinee, the list is endless. 2) the scope of weekend trip you can plan across 3 days instead of two is exponentially higher. So much room for activities. 3) time after the working day just isn't that useful. Drive home, eat dinner, now it's 630/7pm. Waste a couple hours, go to sleep. After a 10hour day, the time after work is precious and useful to relax, but then you get a whole other day off. It surely isn't for everyone, but it surely is for a lot of people. The thing that blows my mind is no one is even willing to try.
- mtreis86 4y ago
  I had one job, night shift snowmaking at a ski resort, that was on a 12hr 3-day/4-day schedule. So 36 hours one week, 48 the next. It was wonderful because the 4-day weekend felt like a vacation every other week. Plus, at that amount of time on shift, you get paid to eat two meals.
- jokethrowaway 4y ago
  There are different type of works. I can push boxes or clean a ship as long as I have strength, which is likely to be 10 hours. I can't make productive decisions for 10 hours in a row. If you increase the amount of hours, you don't get more knowledge work done. You just get more meetings and useless fillers or procrastination. All in all, I think dictating when employees work is stupid, exactly how it's stupid to pay a contractor per hour. You should always pay based on output, no matter when that output was achieved. On the contrary, you might even want to pay more if the desired output was achieved earlier than expected (and not pay less because he must have worked less hours). Be ruthless on the output, don't bother about the hours.
Nifty3929 4y ago
My under-informed perception is that the UK is suffering from an overall productivity crisis, having prioritized other things for the last decade. This resulting in inflation and a weakening of the pound, and with a lower quality of life on average than they would have otherwise. When people produce less, then there is obviously less to go around. Will these folks produce as much in 4 days as 5? Maybe, I guess we'll see. Maybe they'll produce MORE. But unless they do, or find something economically productive to do with their extra time, the UK will have less as a result. Will the farmers work less? How about those in the energy sector? Or medicine? Or construction? I'll be happy to hear from people with better information who can corroborate or refute my perception.
- lmm 4y ago
  > This resulting in inflation and a weakening of the pound, and with a lower quality of life on average than they would have otherwise. > When people produce less, then there is obviously less to go around. Will these folks produce as much in 4 days as 5? Maybe, I guess we'll see. Maybe they'll produce MORE. But unless they do, or find something economically productive to do with their extra time, the UK will have less as a result. Well, these people are pretty much guaranteed to get better quality of life immediately. Will that come at a cost in production? Maybe. But piling on more work hours hasn't worked. > Will the farmers work less? How about those in the energy sector? Or medicine? Or construction? I sure hope so. The UK has more farmers than reasonable, working tiny farms, propped up by subsidies. Medicine loses far more to the mistakes caused by overlong working hours than it gains from those hours, and I wouldn't be surprised if energy or construction was the same.
debevv 4y ago
I'll repeat a comment I saw here on HN some time ago about the productivity issue: if an asteroid were to hit the earth in one month, and there were a team of NASA engineers working to stop it, would you rather say them to work 4 days per week, or 6-7?
- jjcon 4y ago
  I guess I'd rather live on a planet where most people didn't have to work like their life was in dire jeopardy all the time...
- idlehand 4y ago
  Most people have working lives spanning decades, so maximizing the output of any one month is generally counterproductive. However, if you have a well-rested, happy and productive team that has adequate time for leisure and recreation, you can turn up the pace for those exceptional months that are really make or break. But if you try to get people to run at that pace continuously, you'll get a lot of resignations and a few heart attacks at 50.
- ojkelly 4y ago
  Working in a crisis (crunch, etc) mode 100% of the time is not healthy or sustainable. People can stretch to meet a deadline, or avert a crisis—but they need time to recover afterwards. The extra effort and productivity comes at a cost that needs to be repaid for their health and wellbeing. The purpose of the 4 day week trials around the world has been to evaluate if there’s a measurable drop in productivity, and it seems overwhelmingly there hasn’t been.
- Chirono 4y ago
  Stretch the timelines out a bit. Say the asteroid is two years off (a fairly typical startup runway). I would much rather know the planning, decisions and execution of the one thing that could save my life were done by well rested and level headed individuals, not stressed out sleep deprived people more prone to missing details and making mistakes.
- aeze 4y ago
  6-7 for the month, then take the next several months (or longer) off.
alanlammiman 4y ago
I find the work week is often short to get bigger multi-person things done, and when doing them over 2 weeks the weekend in the middle really breaks the rhythm. A lot of the discussion centers on individual productivity - but so little of what companies do is individual! My dream scenario in terms of getting stuff done would be something like a 10 day work week, 10h per day (nice round 100h block) - and then something like a 5 day weekend
kypro 4y ago
I want to support this, but I guess I just don't understand how the economics of it works? Firstly, I would just note that wealth can't be legislated into existence. It has to be created against entropy, with effort. If something is effortless then there is no value in it. So in an efficient economy where all labour was being used productively at all times it's basically just physics that a 4 day work week would reduce total economic output, and as a consequence lower per-capita wealth. However, being charitable here, I think there are some nuances in the real world because labour isn't always used productively -- especially when companies are unprofitable due to high energy bills. > “With many businesses struggling to afford 10% inflation pay rises, we’re starting to see increasing evidence that a four-day week with no loss of pay is being offered as an alternative solution.” I used to work on the a high street in the UK and we'd often close an hour or two early in the winter if it was quiet. Reason being it made little sense keeping the shop heated and powered for us just to be sat around doing nothing until close of business. In those few hours (late on the day in winter, often when raining) the company was briefly unprofitable to operate and therefore closing early made economic sense. I can only assume a lot of shops and restaurants are in a similar position in the UK today. So if you can do 95% of your typical business over just 4 days then this probably makes a lot of sense. But what I don't understand is that surely in the vast majority of cases it would make far more sense to close a bit earlier instead of closing for an entire day? If you're a restaurant for example, just operating at peak times could be a good idea. But whether this is good or bad will massively vary from business to business. Companies which don't have peak days or times will see little benefit from something like this. Perhaps some companies could neglect certain customers and clients for more profitable ones. A plumber might just focus on jobs for wealthier clients for example then perhaps they can take the Friday off. But what I don't understand here is this idea that we can reduce the work week to 4 days without cost as a general rule. Let's take a fairly typical company which has a 5% profit margin and where 50% of costs are labour costs. Eg, for every £100 in sales, £50 goes to labour and £5 is profit. Lets now increase the hourly cost of that labour by 20% as suggested... Now for every £100 in sales, £60 goes to labour and -£5 is made in profit. Of course, big business with better margins will probably be fine but a move like this would likely bankrupt most typical highstreet businesses. The economics just doesn't make any sense without some plan to increase productivity by 20%. And then how would something like this work in the NHS? Can we even afford to reduce nurses hours by 20%? Are we really suggesting that would have no economic impact or would we need to increase the NHS workforce by 20%? Could we even afford that? But if you really want to reduce your work week by 20% the correct way to do it (imo) is to find more productive uses for your labour. If you can increase your income by 20% you can spend 20% less time working at no cost to your annual income. Or you can just take a 20% hit to your annual income. Most of us here could probably afford to do that now. We just choose to work because we're greedy.
tomohawk 4y ago
Contrast the attitude here with the attitude from this guy: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/12821/making-steam-the-life-and-times-of-a-u-s-navy-chief-engineer https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/12821/making-steam-the...
Eleison23 4y ago
I'm curious how much of the 4-day workweek movement is driven by religious obligation. Jews rest on the Sabbath which typically falls on Saturdays, plus high holy days. Christians rest on the Lord's Day, which falls on Sundays, plus holy days of obligation for Orthodox, Catholic, etc. Up until now in the Western business world we've standardized on a five-day week which allows Jews and Christians to have their rests, and soccer moms to have their bloody soccer matches. But with an increasing number of Muslims in the mix, there is a demand from Muslim faithful to rest and pray on Fridays. Create a four-day work week and now you've got 3 days of rest, 1 for each type of Abrahamic faithful person to go pray. Muslims already have won major concessions in terms of prayer times and spaces in office buildings, college campuses, etc.
saidajigumi 4y ago
Having worked at a company that did a four-day week, I'll chime in that it was both amazing and eye opening. I say that as someone who had read Tom DeMarco's now-classic book Slack[1] long ago, after a lot of up-close and personal with the antipatterns described therein. Intellectually, I expected something(??) good but the reality was even more suprising. With a four-day work week, I was able to complete (solo!) a production website application upgrade (Rails 2.x to 4.5) in a very reasonable timeline, and less than I'd heard competent teams failing the same task elsewhere. This wasn't because of any "10x developer" nonsense - it was clearly because I had a /three-day weekend/ every week and came in on Monday clear headed and ready to HIT IT, BABY. Let me be clear: I later realized that this project would have been a soul-draining death march at many other places I'd worked in my career. Exhausted just a few weeks in, with management hounding the team for schedule estimates that can't possibly exist because management failed to fund maintenance for years.[2] (There were actually rational reasons for this, in this case. tl;dr the project got renewed interest and investment due to a new business case.) To those who lament on this topic about "devs (in country X) just aren't motivated these days" or whatever, let me suggest something. If you have poor clarity of purpose, poor giving-a-fsck about humans, or a number of other culture failings then yes, you may encounter problems. Your solution is still not to tie your knowledge workers to their desks. You need to fix the root causes of your underlying productivity debt, not pave over them with an overwork-butts-in-seats mentality which just makes things worse in the long run (<--- read DeMarco). [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Slack-Getting-Burnout-Busywork-Efficiency/dp/0767907698 https://www.amazon.com/Slack-Getting-Burnout-Busywork-Effici... [2]: Pro tip: "evergreen" ecosystems, especially young and rapidly changing ones like early-mid Ruby/Rails and a lot of current npm/JS-based stuff, often have a wickedly non-linear cost curve if/when maintenance and dependency updates fall off. Some of the most expensive I've encountered of this ilk is when /test infrastructure/ incurred a lot of past churn that wasn't tracked, but suddenly (cough) needs to be updated.
cbeach 4y ago
I think it was Henry Ford that originally came up with the concept of a weekend because he wanted everyday people to buy motorcars for leisure time. So they needed to have some leisure time. I wonder if a five/two day cycle is the balance that optimises production and consumption in a modern economy? Maybe the weekends should be longer… or shorter?
cbeach 4y ago
I suspect some of the gains found in the trial companies will be short-lived if /all/ companies transition to a four day week. At the moment, trial companies offer a rare and coveted perk. They’ll attract a large pool of candidates for their roles, and they’ll choose the best. Generally speaking, the best from a larger pool are better than the best from a smaller pool. Trial companies will also retain their staff more easily. Four day week employers are hard to find, so no one would want to give up such a rare perk. But the playing field levels off when all companies offer this perk. So I’d be suspicious of the results of this trial. I don’t think four day week companies will enjoy the same success forever.
tiffanyh 4y ago
An oft overlook topic is childcare. And I'm not just talking about little kids, big kids too. For those companies that went from 5 days x 8 Hours ... to now 4 days x 10 hours (8am to 6/7pm), what happens to children during this extra time? Our entire society is based on the assumption parents end work by 5pm. Who's going to feed and get kids ready for bed if the parent are now arriving home 2-hours later, which might be the kids bedtime.
curious_cat_163 4y ago
> They argue that a four-day week would drive companies to improve their productivity, meaning they can create the same output using fewer hours. I am very new to this subject. I am also skeptical of the claim above. However, one assumes that if Guardian is printing the above, there is some ‘evidence’ that it might be true. Is there any?
mjfl 4y ago
"4-day work week brings no loss of productivity" -employee "3-day work week brings no loss of productivity" -employee "2-day work week brings no loss of productivity" -employee "1-day work week brings no loss of productivity" -employee "0-day work week brings no loss of productivity" -employee "Yeah, that's why we're firing you." -Boss
boredemployee 4y ago
This type of discussion always leads me to believe that the current model does not work. I always had the impression that, on average, we are all or will be enslaved in some way, what differentiates are values and benefits. So, one additional day to do my activities, be with my family, or just do nothing, seems very fair to me.
Saigonauticon 4y ago
I live in Vietnam. The first time I saw this, I asked my colleagues: Who would want to work one day more per week, for half what someone makes in the UK? We were all willing to do it without hesitation (actually many of us already do this for less revenue -- side gigs are fairly ubiquitous here). One of us added that they hope the West shifts to a three day week soon, so we can get 2 more days of work! I know this misses the point about time vs. productivity, but thought I'd share that the attitude here is very different.
skeeter2020 4y ago
> they can create the same output using fewer hours. but the hours cost more, so ?
_carbyau_ 4y ago
One of the things I wondered was: if everyone generally works Mon-Fri 9-5pm. Then a large part of consumers are at work while everyone is hoping to meet their needs. Maybe a roughly equal split of Mon-Thurs and Tues-Fri business will allow more freedom for consumers to consume on Mondays and Fridays. Thus benefitting the precious GDP numbers by which everything seems to be judged.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
This is a secret tool that will help us increase the disparity between casual and permanent employees later.
jalapenos 4y ago
There seems an unnecessary presumption that this means 4/5th of the work hours, with an implication of 4/5ths of the output. But a 4 day week can also be four 9 hour days. So long as management adjusts daily expectations to match, there's no need to expect lower productivity, or to demand a salary cut. Overall though it's a fairly open secret that, especially in big companies, you can set a 40hr work week, but you're not getting 40hrs of actual work from them. And for some jobs this is just beyond people's fatigue limits anyway. To hazard a guess, for in-office, the average would likely be around 25 to 30 hours. The rest goes into the ping pong table, chatting, morning coffee, reading HN etc. So there's plenty of margin to lower scheduled hours and raise expectations during those hours. There's also plenty of room to give 3 days of rest in exchange for 4 days all-hands-on-deck.
t00l00 4y ago
You can already try that by taking 4-8 days (depending how many bank holidays are around) out of your 28 days and work for two months 4-days a week. I did so in July and June and it was a blast. From my tests, as long as you manage other people expectations, nobody will notice or care if you’re not there in IT. And it’s not only 4 days of work. It’s also 3 days of rest. It’s obviously for the same reason but still… it does feel more powerful once you feel it on yourself. Distressing is amazing. Once you try you will never want to go back. Tbh I already work 100% remotely with flexible hours I want, and as long as I deliver nobody cares how much I work. Why anyone would? Seriously, who cares? As long as value is delivered: nobody.

398 points by nigerian1981 4y ago

I think some industries are going to be "better suited" to this than others. But it doesn't have to be that way. If we could shift ever so slightly away from "Biggest Number at end of year - bigger than last years number - at all costs" we could increase staff by just a little bit and move just about any industry to 4 or even 3 day work week. This and worker-cooperative-businesses. I've yet to hear a legitimately compelling argument against, especially when we see the results. (I mean, the arguments are typically, "They have problems, too!" and "Bob Votes to be CEO") Theory is great but how can you hold onto the theory when the experimental data is at least promising?

williamtrask 4y ago
I imagine the main argument has to do with having enough surplus to innovate. That said of course there’s plenty of times where surplus doesn’t go to innovation.
- shadowfoxx 4y ago
  The fact that a company has profit at all means there is surplus. They mean the same thing. as a side note; "Innovation" in my view is not a reason in and of itself to do something. Its too nebulous a term to have real meaning. Like - how much innovating are 7-11's doing or most other commercial shops? Would that money be better spent elsewhere? What percentage of 'innovations' actually fail vs those that prove worth it? etc etc.
lotsofpulp 4y ago
> If we could shift ever so slightly away from "Biggest Number at end of year - bigger than last years number - at all costs" we could increase staff by just a little bit and move just about any industry to 4 or even 3 day work week. The problem with this approach is buyers are looking for the lowest price, so it requires efforts on the national government scale (or multiple national governments, even significantly all of them) to put a floor on this lowest price. Otherwise you will get outcompeted by someone able to obtain/perform labor for cheaper.
- shadowfoxx 4y ago
  I'm not sure I understand who the parties are in your example. Who are the buyers? (Employers? People buying your product?) How does any business not get outcompeted by a race to the bottom where people are always willing to perform/obtain the labor more cheaply? Why do the costs of goods get more expensive every year? If our system is so dysfunctional it can't give an inch towards the quality of life of the people living under it. Burn it to the ground, I say. We used to say the Divine Right of Kings was the best we could do.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Buyers are anyone buying goods and services, from people who vote for politicians that promise lower taxes due to negotiating more labor hours per dollar, or someone going to Walmart and buying a $10 shirt from Bangladesh over a $20 US made shirt (made up numbers). People who buy from McDonalds over the local burger place that is more that twice as expensive. >How does any business not get outcompeted by a race to the bottom where people are always willing to perform/obtain the labor more cheaply? They do get outcompeted, hence manufacturing and textile businesses moving to other parts of the world from US/UK/Europe. And people opting to shop at large businesses with economies of scale like Walmart and Aldi over mom and pop places. >Why do the costs of goods get more expensive every year? The cost of some goods gets more expensive. A lot of consumer goods went down in price for people in US/UK/Europe for many of the post WW2 decades. It is only recently that labor costs might have started pushing prices up in real terms.
    - shadowfoxx 4y ago
      I think we're still using "Biggest number profit, bigger than last-year number at all cost" thinking here. Because from my understanding and using some of the language you're using - Costs are going up "Due to labor costs going up" but these same companies are showing record profits. So it seems to me that there's room for the cost of labor to go up without increasing prices, necessarily. But the idea that companies Profit a little less - and I will never let anyone forget that profit is excess - is unfathomable to some.
VLM 4y ago
My actual experience with 4 day work is the closer the team is to operations (2nd and 3rd shift 7 days per week) and the closer to contractor/consultants the easier the transition. I would caution people to be careful what they wish for; my longest 4-day gig involved sun-wed and wed-sat shifts. 4-day doesn't necessarily mean mon-thr ever week for everyone. Another problem was our overlap day was wed thus "wednesday is non productive its for meetings and stuff" so you really only worked three days because you couldn't trust not to be interrupted on wednesday. Its probably of enormous productivity value to move all interruptions to exactly one day every week, however you don't need 4-day to do that, technically speaking. Another oddity probably of more interest to bean counters is our overlap day was wednesday so with all hands on deck we did maint and rollouts and upgrades on wednesday, but the rest of the world did maintenance windows on the weekend at 2am so our meaningless measure of fake uptime was lower than non-4day companies. Now does your employer value rolling out better stuff faster, or do they value a "better" meaningless heavily gamed number? So 4-day might be better or worse depending on if your local management lives in reality or spreadsheet-metric-land. "Oh no how will we get fake nine nines of uptime if we roll out new SaaS on Wednesdays?"

retrac98 4y ago

I never really understood the push for a 4 day work week here. As things stand, part time work seems really common in the UK anyway. Loads of people I know work 2-4 days per week for a variety of reasons. There's no stigma. It's already pretty normal?

dtagames 4y ago
The keyword here is "no loss of pay." These people will work 4 days a week for their previous 5-day salary.
- OJFord 4y ago
  But perhaps pay rises will stagnate and they'll gradually not be competitive with 5-day companies at full pay. Edit: Oh, it's started already, from the article: > "With many businesses struggling to afford 10% inflation pay rises, we're starting to see increasing evidence that a four-day week with no loss of pay is being offered as an alternative solution."
  - ksec 4y ago
    Yes, with inflation and stagnant wage growth ( even before the pandemic ) I think and hope the 4 days work solution will push for increase in productivity per working hours. Unfortunately not every industry is suited for 4 days work. But May be UK should start with Civil Servant?
nigerian1981 4y ago
Work life balance
- LightG 4y ago
  You've been downvoted but, in simplicity, that is the message and what employees want now. Employers/managers, listen up. It's worth emphasising beause many bosses still haven't got this message. I'm currently quiet-quitting, and will actually-quit shortly, because of this attitude. It's not about being work-shy. It's about busting your arse for a company (and self/respect) and then when the realisation dawns on everyone that flexibility is not only possible but has helped productivity (n=1 our productivity and balance sheet improved during covid), and then to have the door shut on that realisation ... you can expect employees to switch off. Our entire team feels this way. We'll all be gone soon. /rant

hunglee2 4y ago

Some progressive stuff coming out of the UK; there isn't much of it, as political chaos unleashed by Brexit remains all consuming for the party that runs the country, but this experiment was the largest of its type, and so far, looks a great success. Remains to be seen whether firms who make this commitment will be able to outcompete traditional '5-day-ers' in a recessionary environment, you hope they will but that will be the big test

spoonjim 4y ago

This will only work if the labor laws allow for easy firing. The 4-day week at a regular market salary will be very attractive and will attract top performers as long as the company has the flexibility to remove the underperformers.

Moissanite 4y ago
Getting rid of underperformers in regular private sector roles in the UK isn't really that bad; certainly closer to Germany than the US, but on the whole about right. Public sector is another matter; getting rid of dead weight in the civil service is a tough problem and suppresses the salaries of other employees there, leading to a downward spiral.
- maccard 4y ago
  > Getting rid of underperformers in regular private sector roles in the UK isn't really that bad; certainly closer to Germany than the US, but on the whole about right <...> Public sector is another matter The uk has practically no employment rights when you have less than 2 years service. One of the (many) articles on the subject [0]. The employment rights in the public sector are similar, with most of the "unfireable" aspect being people who have been there long enough that it's easier to move them around than it is to get rid of them. The civil service in the UK has an unreasonably long probationary period (9 months) which if people actually cared about removing unproductive employees could be much better applied. [0] https://www.davidsonmorris.com/dismissing-an-employee-with-less-than-2-years-service/ https://www.davidsonmorris.com/dismissing-an-employee-with-l...

Reason077 4y ago

From a macroeconomic perspective, this doesn’t seem like the best time to be trying this sort of thing. We already have a labour shortage and a lot of inflationary pressure! If we had high productivity, high unemployment, and low inflation, then introducing a 4 day week would be a great solution.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
This is the best time to try it. Labor has all the power, and will into the future due to structural demographics. For capital, it never seems to be a good time to try anything that doesn’t allow for maximum extraction or any semblance of labor power or quality of life improvements. For example, US railroad workers are about to strike because they dare ask for paid sick leave. It’ll cost $2B/day to the US economy, not because of unreasonable demands (paid sick leave!), but because of unreasonable management and shareholders. Edit: (can’t reply, HN throttling) Good luck attempting to solve for labor power with immigration. Folks who lean right (and a cohort of centrists) don’t want it, and they still have enough voting power to be somewhat relevant for the next 5-10 years (in the US, the UK, and many parts of Europe; Italy’s most recent elections showcase this), as electorate turnover takes time, not to mention declining fertility rates everywhere squeezing the young, productive cohort globally. https://www.npr.org/2022/11/21/1137640529/railroads-freight-rail-unions-vote-contract-strike https://www.npr.org/2022/11/21/1137640529/railroads-freight-...
- mantas 4y ago
  Capital will just push for ever bigger immigration to counter labour.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    How? Labour has all the voting power, capital only wins if they can manipulate labour to vote against its own interests like they managed in USA.
    - mantas 4y ago

Moissanite 4y ago

The key to this in my view is having it be an officially "approved" option. Working at a FAANG company in the UK, I could already afford to take a 20% pay cut and work a 4 day week. I would love to do so in fact - but since that working pattern is relatively uncommon, I don't have the confidence that colleagues would respect or acknowledge it - basically I see myself spending an excessive amount of time telling people that I am not available on Friday for that meeting, and no I won't make an exception just for this week. Or, I would make an exception and get sucked into work - and now the company is getting 20% of my time for free. If a 4-day week was more widespread, I would have more confidence in maintaining it - and on the odd occasion I have to work the extra day, I wouldn't feel so bad given the 100% pay model described here.

benjiweber 4y ago
Do people ask you to make an exception and attend meetings when you have a Friday booked off from your holiday allowance? What would be different if you have it booked off for working pattern?
- Moissanite 4y ago
  Not unheard of, but also I do think it would be different - everyone knows holiday time is limited, which feels different to having an unusually long weekend every week. It shouldn't, and maybe I am overly concerned by the impact this would have - but I would still be much more comfortable with the idea if it is at least available org-wide rather than by exception only.
  - logifail 4y ago
    > I do think it would be different Q: If a cow-orker isn't at work on a given day, for whatever reason (sickness, holiday, part-timer), why would one expect to be able to contact them?
    - Moissanite 4y ago
      This sends us off on a tangent about communication techniques, and specifically the down-sides of Slack. I personally try to use it like a richer email system (i.e. asynchronously as much as possible) but you always get the odd person who insists on "hello are you there" as their opening message.

agsamek 4y ago

I live in Poland. We are recently being recognized as a developed economy most often. Still, we earn 1/3 in dollar terms per Capita compared to the US or Germany. I think 4 days week would result in people having two jobs regularly. I wonder if the situation is simalar with basic job workers in more advanced economies. One interesing point is that people in my IT company were willing to put 5-10% of their income in exchange for work from home. But this is IT. I think that the right way to go is not to reduce the number of hours but just allow people to work 4 days per week with hourly rate intact. This might be a very welcomed option by many people. Also - signing up for this in the high inflation time might work well instead of raising compensations. So this is a good time to carry such experiments.

varispeed 4y ago
> were willing to put 5-10% of their income in exchange for work from home. Why? The company is going to use your home as an office and they should be paying that 5-10% extra. Why business paying corporate landlord for office space is okay, but when Joe Public offers his own lowly place then it's a no no? When people don't recognise their value, they are prime for being exploited.
- bluesign 4y ago
  There is no inherit value, it is determined by market, mostly supply and demand.
  - zach_garwood 4y ago
    Maybe you folks don't have to pay property taxes, but in the US we do, and that's a pretty clear indication of an "inherent value".
    - bluesign 4y ago
      Sorry if it was not clear, I meant value of work.
  - deleted 4y ago

varispeed 4y ago

The UK wages are laughably low, so these corporations are doing no favours. The still enjoy record profits and their board members probably laugh that serfs even think that these corporations are being so "generous".

yellow_lead 4y ago
Genuine question though - isn't there some tradeoff for this like labor benefits (vacation, healthcare, etc)?
- sokoloff 4y ago
  If you had 25 days of PTO per year before, I would view having 20 days per year as the equivalent, but others will no doubt disagree.
- youngtaff 4y ago
  Earlier this year I went from a 5 day week to 4 days spread over 5 with no loss of PTO / benefits etc. Some people were already on a 4 day week and they were essentially given a 25% pay rise instead
- VLM 4y ago
  I've worked a couple places like this and the real argument is "thanksgiving in the USA is always a thursday which is unfair to the wed-sat team" if they're forced to work or "unfair to the sun-wed team" if they wanted to work for triple overtime holiday pay and similar arguments about election day always being a Tuesday there are five federal holidays IIRC that are off on Mondays but no federal holidays on fri or sat, etc. Usually whining problems were solved by "this system has been here since your grandparents and you signed up for it so suck it up or transfer teams or quit" Technically the system was only there for their grandparents in operations and finance always worked 9-5 m-f until thirty years ago so it is new out of operations, but whatever. The vacation problem was solved by providing "weeks" to everyone along with the interesting legal fiction that everyone worked ten hours so our "weeks" were implemented using "hours". So new employees got "two weeks" which on paper were implemented as 80 hours. These are all very old issues in 24x7 operations environments including outside IT/tech/computer-stuff. The only "innovation" is when the payroll clerk starts doing 4x10s like she's a front line nurse, or the graphics artist in marketing starts doing 4x10s 3rd shift like he's a field service tech.

neets 4y ago

Currency collapses a bit and the government plans to print money to subsidize 4 day work week. The world sounds more and more like a Ayn Rand novel by the day.

upmostly 4y ago

There are likely several hundreds, if not thousands of companies already offering a 4-day work week or something similar. For example, I work at a company called Forestreet (https://forestreet.com https://forestreet.com) and we already offer a 9-day fortnight. The idea is that you condense your work week into 9 days, and take the 10th day off. There are pros and cons to this model, but overall it's working very well.

5555624 4y ago
We've had that "9-day fortnight" for years. Initially, it was slow to catch on, as the "10th day" was Wednesday. Once it was changed so that employees could pick the day, most people picked Monday or Friday. An added "bonus": It all but eliminated meetings on Mondays and Fridays, as there were always some people out on those days. On Sundays, you don't need to worry about a meeting the next day; on Friday, you can catch up on stuff.

ITB 4y ago

Just what we need to fight global inflation.

coding123 4y ago

So instead of developers working 3 hours a day for 4 days, they work 3 hours a day for 3 days. Because Thursday become the new Friday, which was already an "off" day.

coding123 4y ago

Has anyone else noticed that after the layoffs most of these articles have been vanishing lately.

pessimizer 4y ago

I've loved the idea of moving to an 8 day week, where two 4-day a week people share the same 7-day a week job, and use the surplus day to coordinate with each other or work on tasks that would be better with two.

poszlem 4y ago

I expect to be downvoted for saying this, as some people are really precious about the idea of 4-day work week, but I really struggle to understand how working fewer hours will not result in loss of productivity. If for some reason it is true that working 4 days a week results in the same amount of productivity, then why are 3 days a week not even more productive? Or 2? This is obviously reductio ad absurdum but that would mean that people who work 0 hours are the most productive ones. I know that there is the argument about "if I have fewer hours they will be more focused", but that to me sounds like it's entirely wishful thinking and in a few years will be having the same amount of wasted hours in those days too, as people start thinking of Thursday as the new Friday. I assume there is some sort of middle ground between working too much and working too little. Are there any actual evidence that that optimum middle ground is 4 days and not 3, or 5? I would find the whole idea much more palatable if it wasn't sold by claiming something likely isn't true (people working fewer hours do more work), and instead someone was honest and admitted that this is a political project. What I find much more interesting is switching from a 7 day week to something else entirely, for example working on: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday is free, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday is free. I can see how that might result in people being more productive, as they still work the same amount of hours, but they don't get as exhausted as before.

vorpalhex 4y ago
We need to do experiments and gather data to test hypothesis. This is one of those experiments.
adamckay 4y ago
The no loss of productivity can be a combination of multiple things: a) There is loss in productivity but it isn't (or can't be) properly measured or does not make an impact on the business, e.g. a help desk responds to customers with 1 business day rather than 4 business hours. b) People are more motivated (including it being a novelty) so employees are eager to work harder in their reduced hours to ensure they can continue a 4-day working week. If this becomes the norm after a while you may see this slack off. c) Lots of people are doing busy-work or "bullshit tasks" which do not actually affect business productivity or are simply just looking busy and procrastinating, e.g. office workers browsing Twitter, Reddit or HN for a short time every couple of hours which is eliminated. It highlights saying "don't confuse activity with achievement/productivity".

Silverback_VII 4y ago

The corporate insects will just suck out your life energy in four days instead of five so that you need three days of recovery instead of two.

mattkevan 4y ago

At a place I used to work for, the four day week question was put to the CEO at an all-hands company town hall. Not a fan of the idea, he scoffed and said something like, ‘I pay you to be at your desk from 9am-5.30pm Monday-Friday. Why should I pay you the same for a day less?’ I don’t think he realised it at the time, but that answer was devastating to company productivity and morale. He’d just demonstrated to everyone that he didn’t value results and all that was important was bums on seats. People stopped putting in extra effort, waited out their hours as that was all that was required and started brushing up their CVs. I left not long after and so did many others.

galoisscobi 4y ago
The director for the org I work in says something along those lines after every release cycle. He thanks everyone for working long hours and on burning the midnight oil on weekends, and that’s it. I personally never work long hours or work on weekends and those speeches feel alienating. I think hard during the day, strive to be creative and then go back to my life outside work without donating my free hours to a company that would be just fine without them. I’ve heard that what we appreciate in people also tells a lot about us and when I hear my director only acknowledge the long hours, I realize that only the long hours are appreciated. Luckily my immediate management chain knows better and understand the importance of creativity, meaningful output and WLB that I stick around.
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>I left not long after and so did many others. The question from me is, did you manage to move to a company where you got paid the same or more, but for "a day less hours"? Employers can make that claim if the job market is in their favor, i.e. if most other companies agree with them and decide that they need staff available Mo-Fr 9-5 or for less hours but also for proportionally less salary, which to my experience is most employers. To normalize this, we need the majority of employers (>51% of them) to switch to paying market rate for less hours, putting pressure on the rest that this is the new norm, but I haven't seen that yet in my EU country, except for a notable couple of companies that made headlines, out of which one recently filed for bankruptcy. So as long as only a tiny minority of companies are doing this, the norm will not change. All businesses here think like your ex-boss: 'Why should I pay you the same for a day less?’ and the market favors their approach as they have seen no mass resignations since they all can afford to act like this. Therefore, the only solution would be the same as the one that lead to the 8 hour workweek being normalized almost 100 years ago: mass strikes and labor movements followed by government regulations that makes the 4 day workweek the new norm for everyone.

theptip 4y ago

> They argue that a four-day week would drive companies to improve their productivity, meaning they can create the same output using fewer hours. The idea that there is a population-wide 25% productivity boost just lying unnoticed on the sidewalk sounds asinine to me. Strong claims require strong evidence and I don’t see it. That said, I have worked a 4-day week before and it was great, but I took a proportional pay cut and wasn’t expected to somehow become super-productive. Some more charitable interpretations of why this approach might be great: * We can afford to take the pay cut and would be happier (and perhaps a little more productive) working fewer hours; * Companies with a 50-60 hour work week might have pervasive burnout and therefore get a substantial performance boost by decreasing their workload by 20%, with “4-day workweek” being a better coordination point than “only work 9-5”; * Optionality will be a good perk for employees allowing the small number of companies deploying this to get better employees (this doesn’t work if 4-day is widely adopted).

lmm 4y ago
> The idea that there is a population-wide 25% productivity boost just lying unnoticed on the sidewalk sounds asinine to me. Strong claims require strong evidence and I don’t see it. When the UK went on a 3-day week during the '70s, production was 96% of normal. The idea that people are being actually productive for 40 hours/week sounds pretty absurd to me.
- theptip 4y ago
  Citation? What was the context? And why did they go back if they were actually not getting more productivity? > The idea that people are being actually productive for 40 hours/week sounds pretty absurd to me The alternative is surely far more absurd. Employees could be working 3 day weeks and producing just as much, and somehow nobody noticed? There exist employee-owned co-ops, and employee-owned startups. If there was an equal-productivity yet far more enjoyable way of working, these companies would be stealing all the best workers. The absence of any evidence of these companies existence is strong evidence that no such effect exists. Indeed the evidence points in the opposite direction; there are plenty of examples of scrappy small companies putting in crazy hours and getting loads done. I have experienced this first hand, and pick any successful startup and you’re likely to find evidence of positive marginal productivity beyond 40h/week. The objective research I’ve seen on the subject points to net-zero marginal productivity around 55-60h/week, WAY higher than the 40 you are claiming: https://docs.iza.org/dp8129.pdf https://docs.iza.org/dp8129.pdf

rose_ann_ 4y ago

I think more companies should sign up for this. It would really help the employees. Others might say it's just one added day to the days of rest you have. But an additional day can go a long way.

bArray 4y ago

You're being sold "work less hours, get paid the same". In actual fact: > “With many businesses struggling to afford 10% inflation pay rises, we’re starting to see increasing evidence that a four-day week with no loss of pay is being offered as an alternative solution.” When compared to inflation, you'll get paid less. It says 10%, but wages have been frozen for years. Worse still, you will still be expected to achieve the same amount in less time. The only difference is that they will expect your most productive hours without also paying for your less productive hours. _You_ may be in a position to take a 20% pay cut, but as they mention, they want this to become the norm for everybody. As the cost of living increases less and less will be in this position.

pbhjpbhj 4y ago
>It says 10%, but wages have been frozen for years // And, in UK at least, we have more billionaires and an ever increasing wealth gap .. we've got more efficient production than ever it's just that the wealthy are taking all the benefit. That's only going to get worse; we act now or workers will have too little money to mount any sort of opposition.

ggm 4y ago

Australian standard working day is 37.5 hours. What is this 40 hours of which you speak?

methodical 4y ago
Australians work 37.5 hours out of the 24 hours in a day regularly? What an incredible display of work ethic. On a less sarcastic note off of your typo, in the US and presumably UK, the regular work week is 9-5 M-F which translates into 40 hour work weeks.
- leni536 4y ago
  9-5 with a .5 hour lunch break comes out 37.5 hours.

whywhywhydude 4y ago

At the startup that I work at the biggest complaint from customers is no 24 hour support, but my company doesn’t want people to work on weekends or work overnight. Doesn’t four hour week mean even less support? You’d have to deal with crappy AI - automated bots with canned response, awful self checkouts at groceries and restaurants, waiting even longer at DMV for an appointment, etc.

mietek 4y ago
Hire more people.
Philip-J-Fry 4y ago
Why doesn't your company want people to work on weekends or overnight? Hire some people to do it, those who want to will apply. Some people would rather work on weekends and have days off in the week. Some people are night owls who would prefer to work overnight. No other 24/7 company with good compensation struggles to hire for these jobs.

joeman1000 4y ago

This is ‘shrinkflation’, but for worker-hours. Like when you buy some potato chips and the packet is smaller, but you pay the same price as before.

kranke155 4y ago

Even a single 4 day week a month is a huge bonus for most people I’d say.

mkl95 4y ago

At my previous place we did half day Fridays. But there was MASSIVE overtime from Monday to Thursday. I don't want a four-day week where I'm expected to "compensate" by working for free. Companies should stop bullshitting their employees before offering a four-day week.

kryogen1c 4y ago

In the US nuclear navy, the power plants have to be manned 24 hours a day both operating and shutdown. Ships in maintenance periods also generally go through a phase where ship personnel have to support maintenance work around the clock. Additionally, some parts of the training pipeline are run 24 hours a day. I say all that to say that while I am not a subject matter expert, I have a significantly above average amount of experience working various types of rotating shift work as well as duty rotations (a duty rotation is working 24 hours every 2, 3, 4, or 5 days depending on available manpower. Yes, you read that right - for a month, I was at work 28 to 32 out of every 48 hours). Forget 4 8 hour days, I would work 4 10 hour days right now in a heartbeat with no discussion or regrets. 1) it is invaluable to have a normal working day where you can do tasks - change your oil, get your haircut, go grocery shopping without a crowd, see a matinee, the list is endless. 2) the scope of weekend trip you can plan across 3 days instead of two is exponentially higher. So much room for activities. 3) time after the working day just isn't that useful. Drive home, eat dinner, now it's 630/7pm. Waste a couple hours, go to sleep. After a 10hour day, the time after work is precious and useful to relax, but then you get a whole other day off. It surely isn't for everyone, but it surely is for a lot of people. The thing that blows my mind is no one is even willing to try.

mtreis86 4y ago
I had one job, night shift snowmaking at a ski resort, that was on a 12hr 3-day/4-day schedule. So 36 hours one week, 48 the next. It was wonderful because the 4-day weekend felt like a vacation every other week. Plus, at that amount of time on shift, you get paid to eat two meals.
jokethrowaway 4y ago
There are different type of works. I can push boxes or clean a ship as long as I have strength, which is likely to be 10 hours. I can't make productive decisions for 10 hours in a row. If you increase the amount of hours, you don't get more knowledge work done. You just get more meetings and useless fillers or procrastination. All in all, I think dictating when employees work is stupid, exactly how it's stupid to pay a contractor per hour. You should always pay based on output, no matter when that output was achieved. On the contrary, you might even want to pay more if the desired output was achieved earlier than expected (and not pay less because he must have worked less hours). Be ruthless on the output, don't bother about the hours.

Nifty3929 4y ago

My under-informed perception is that the UK is suffering from an overall productivity crisis, having prioritized other things for the last decade. This resulting in inflation and a weakening of the pound, and with a lower quality of life on average than they would have otherwise. When people produce less, then there is obviously less to go around. Will these folks produce as much in 4 days as 5? Maybe, I guess we'll see. Maybe they'll produce MORE. But unless they do, or find something economically productive to do with their extra time, the UK will have less as a result. Will the farmers work less? How about those in the energy sector? Or medicine? Or construction? I'll be happy to hear from people with better information who can corroborate or refute my perception.

lmm 4y ago
> This resulting in inflation and a weakening of the pound, and with a lower quality of life on average than they would have otherwise. > When people produce less, then there is obviously less to go around. Will these folks produce as much in 4 days as 5? Maybe, I guess we'll see. Maybe they'll produce MORE. But unless they do, or find something economically productive to do with their extra time, the UK will have less as a result. Well, these people are pretty much guaranteed to get better quality of life immediately. Will that come at a cost in production? Maybe. But piling on more work hours hasn't worked. > Will the farmers work less? How about those in the energy sector? Or medicine? Or construction? I sure hope so. The UK has more farmers than reasonable, working tiny farms, propped up by subsidies. Medicine loses far more to the mistakes caused by overlong working hours than it gains from those hours, and I wouldn't be surprised if energy or construction was the same.

debevv 4y ago

I'll repeat a comment I saw here on HN some time ago about the productivity issue: if an asteroid were to hit the earth in one month, and there were a team of NASA engineers working to stop it, would you rather say them to work 4 days per week, or 6-7?

jjcon 4y ago
I guess I'd rather live on a planet where most people didn't have to work like their life was in dire jeopardy all the time...
idlehand 4y ago
Most people have working lives spanning decades, so maximizing the output of any one month is generally counterproductive. However, if you have a well-rested, happy and productive team that has adequate time for leisure and recreation, you can turn up the pace for those exceptional months that are really make or break. But if you try to get people to run at that pace continuously, you'll get a lot of resignations and a few heart attacks at 50.
ojkelly 4y ago
Working in a crisis (crunch, etc) mode 100% of the time is not healthy or sustainable. People can stretch to meet a deadline, or avert a crisis—but they need time to recover afterwards. The extra effort and productivity comes at a cost that needs to be repaid for their health and wellbeing. The purpose of the 4 day week trials around the world has been to evaluate if there’s a measurable drop in productivity, and it seems overwhelmingly there hasn’t been.
Chirono 4y ago
Stretch the timelines out a bit. Say the asteroid is two years off (a fairly typical startup runway). I would much rather know the planning, decisions and execution of the one thing that could save my life were done by well rested and level headed individuals, not stressed out sleep deprived people more prone to missing details and making mistakes.
aeze 4y ago
6-7 for the month, then take the next several months (or longer) off.

alanlammiman 4y ago

I find the work week is often short to get bigger multi-person things done, and when doing them over 2 weeks the weekend in the middle really breaks the rhythm. A lot of the discussion centers on individual productivity - but so little of what companies do is individual! My dream scenario in terms of getting stuff done would be something like a 10 day work week, 10h per day (nice round 100h block) - and then something like a 5 day weekend

kypro 4y ago

I want to support this, but I guess I just don't understand how the economics of it works? Firstly, I would just note that wealth can't be legislated into existence. It has to be created against entropy, with effort. If something is effortless then there is no value in it. So in an efficient economy where all labour was being used productively at all times it's basically just physics that a 4 day work week would reduce total economic output, and as a consequence lower per-capita wealth. However, being charitable here, I think there are some nuances in the real world because labour isn't always used productively -- especially when companies are unprofitable due to high energy bills. > “With many businesses struggling to afford 10% inflation pay rises, we’re starting to see increasing evidence that a four-day week with no loss of pay is being offered as an alternative solution.” I used to work on the a high street in the UK and we'd often close an hour or two early in the winter if it was quiet. Reason being it made little sense keeping the shop heated and powered for us just to be sat around doing nothing until close of business. In those few hours (late on the day in winter, often when raining) the company was briefly unprofitable to operate and therefore closing early made economic sense. I can only assume a lot of shops and restaurants are in a similar position in the UK today. So if you can do 95% of your typical business over just 4 days then this probably makes a lot of sense. But what I don't understand is that surely in the vast majority of cases it would make far more sense to close a bit earlier instead of closing for an entire day? If you're a restaurant for example, just operating at peak times could be a good idea. But whether this is good or bad will massively vary from business to business. Companies which don't have peak days or times will see little benefit from something like this. Perhaps some companies could neglect certain customers and clients for more profitable ones. A plumber might just focus on jobs for wealthier clients for example then perhaps they can take the Friday off. But what I don't understand here is this idea that we can reduce the work week to 4 days without cost as a general rule. Let's take a fairly typical company which has a 5% profit margin and where 50% of costs are labour costs. Eg, for every £100 in sales, £50 goes to labour and £5 is profit. Lets now increase the hourly cost of that labour by 20% as suggested... Now for every £100 in sales, £60 goes to labour and -£5 is made in profit. Of course, big business with better margins will probably be fine but a move like this would likely bankrupt most typical highstreet businesses. The economics just doesn't make any sense without some plan to increase productivity by 20%. And then how would something like this work in the NHS? Can we even afford to reduce nurses hours by 20%? Are we really suggesting that would have no economic impact or would we need to increase the NHS workforce by 20%? Could we even afford that? But if you really want to reduce your work week by 20% the correct way to do it (imo) is to find more productive uses for your labour. If you can increase your income by 20% you can spend 20% less time working at no cost to your annual income. Or you can just take a 20% hit to your annual income. Most of us here could probably afford to do that now. We just choose to work because we're greedy.

tomohawk 4y ago

Contrast the attitude here with the attitude from this guy: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/12821/making-steam-the-life-and-times-of-a-u-s-navy-chief-engineer https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/12821/making-steam-the...

Eleison23 4y ago

I'm curious how much of the 4-day workweek movement is driven by religious obligation. Jews rest on the Sabbath which typically falls on Saturdays, plus high holy days. Christians rest on the Lord's Day, which falls on Sundays, plus holy days of obligation for Orthodox, Catholic, etc. Up until now in the Western business world we've standardized on a five-day week which allows Jews and Christians to have their rests, and soccer moms to have their bloody soccer matches. But with an increasing number of Muslims in the mix, there is a demand from Muslim faithful to rest and pray on Fridays. Create a four-day work week and now you've got 3 days of rest, 1 for each type of Abrahamic faithful person to go pray. Muslims already have won major concessions in terms of prayer times and spaces in office buildings, college campuses, etc.

saidajigumi 4y ago

Having worked at a company that did a four-day week, I'll chime in that it was both amazing and eye opening. I say that as someone who had read Tom DeMarco's now-classic book Slack[1] long ago, after a lot of up-close and personal with the antipatterns described therein. Intellectually, I expected something(??) good but the reality was even more suprising. With a four-day work week, I was able to complete (solo!) a production website application upgrade (Rails 2.x to 4.5) in a very reasonable timeline, and less than I'd heard competent teams failing the same task elsewhere. This wasn't because of any "10x developer" nonsense - it was clearly because I had a /three-day weekend/ every week and came in on Monday clear headed and ready to HIT IT, BABY. Let me be clear: I later realized that this project would have been a soul-draining death march at many other places I'd worked in my career. Exhausted just a few weeks in, with management hounding the team for schedule estimates that can't possibly exist because management failed to fund maintenance for years.[2] (There were actually rational reasons for this, in this case. tl;dr the project got renewed interest and investment due to a new business case.) To those who lament on this topic about "devs (in country X) just aren't motivated these days" or whatever, let me suggest something. If you have poor clarity of purpose, poor giving-a-fsck about humans, or a number of other culture failings then yes, you may encounter problems. Your solution is still not to tie your knowledge workers to their desks. You need to fix the root causes of your underlying productivity debt, not pave over them with an overwork-butts-in-seats mentality which just makes things worse in the long run (<--- read DeMarco). [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Slack-Getting-Burnout-Busywork-Efficiency/dp/0767907698 https://www.amazon.com/Slack-Getting-Burnout-Busywork-Effici... [2]: Pro tip: "evergreen" ecosystems, especially young and rapidly changing ones like early-mid Ruby/Rails and a lot of current npm/JS-based stuff, often have a wickedly non-linear cost curve if/when maintenance and dependency updates fall off. Some of the most expensive I've encountered of this ilk is when /test infrastructure/ incurred a lot of past churn that wasn't tracked, but suddenly (cough) needs to be updated.

cbeach 4y ago

I think it was Henry Ford that originally came up with the concept of a weekend because he wanted everyday people to buy motorcars for leisure time. So they needed to have some leisure time. I wonder if a five/two day cycle is the balance that optimises production and consumption in a modern economy? Maybe the weekends should be longer… or shorter?

cbeach 4y ago

I suspect some of the gains found in the trial companies will be short-lived if /all/ companies transition to a four day week. At the moment, trial companies offer a rare and coveted perk. They’ll attract a large pool of candidates for their roles, and they’ll choose the best. Generally speaking, the best from a larger pool are better than the best from a smaller pool. Trial companies will also retain their staff more easily. Four day week employers are hard to find, so no one would want to give up such a rare perk. But the playing field levels off when all companies offer this perk. So I’d be suspicious of the results of this trial. I don’t think four day week companies will enjoy the same success forever.

tiffanyh 4y ago

An oft overlook topic is childcare. And I'm not just talking about little kids, big kids too. For those companies that went from 5 days x 8 Hours ... to now 4 days x 10 hours (8am to 6/7pm), what happens to children during this extra time? Our entire society is based on the assumption parents end work by 5pm. Who's going to feed and get kids ready for bed if the parent are now arriving home 2-hours later, which might be the kids bedtime.

curious_cat_163 4y ago

> They argue that a four-day week would drive companies to improve their productivity, meaning they can create the same output using fewer hours. I am very new to this subject. I am also skeptical of the claim above. However, one assumes that if Guardian is printing the above, there is some ‘evidence’ that it might be true. Is there any?

mjfl 4y ago

"4-day work week brings no loss of productivity" -employee "3-day work week brings no loss of productivity" -employee "2-day work week brings no loss of productivity" -employee "1-day work week brings no loss of productivity" -employee "0-day work week brings no loss of productivity" -employee "Yeah, that's why we're firing you." -Boss

boredemployee 4y ago

This type of discussion always leads me to believe that the current model does not work. I always had the impression that, on average, we are all or will be enslaved in some way, what differentiates are values and benefits. So, one additional day to do my activities, be with my family, or just do nothing, seems very fair to me.

Saigonauticon 4y ago

I live in Vietnam. The first time I saw this, I asked my colleagues: Who would want to work one day more per week, for half what someone makes in the UK? We were all willing to do it without hesitation (actually many of us already do this for less revenue -- side gigs are fairly ubiquitous here). One of us added that they hope the West shifts to a three day week soon, so we can get 2 more days of work! I know this misses the point about time vs. productivity, but thought I'd share that the attitude here is very different.

skeeter2020 4y ago

> they can create the same output using fewer hours. but the hours cost more, so ?

_carbyau_ 4y ago

One of the things I wondered was: if everyone generally works Mon-Fri 9-5pm. Then a large part of consumers are at work while everyone is hoping to meet their needs. Maybe a roughly equal split of Mon-Thurs and Tues-Fri business will allow more freedom for consumers to consume on Mondays and Fridays. Thus benefitting the precious GDP numbers by which everything seems to be judged.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

This is a secret tool that will help us increase the disparity between casual and permanent employees later.

jalapenos 4y ago

There seems an unnecessary presumption that this means 4/5th of the work hours, with an implication of 4/5ths of the output. But a 4 day week can also be four 9 hour days. So long as management adjusts daily expectations to match, there's no need to expect lower productivity, or to demand a salary cut. Overall though it's a fairly open secret that, especially in big companies, you can set a 40hr work week, but you're not getting 40hrs of actual work from them. And for some jobs this is just beyond people's fatigue limits anyway. To hazard a guess, for in-office, the average would likely be around 25 to 30 hours. The rest goes into the ping pong table, chatting, morning coffee, reading HN etc. So there's plenty of margin to lower scheduled hours and raise expectations during those hours. There's also plenty of room to give 3 days of rest in exchange for 4 days all-hands-on-deck.

t00l00 4y ago

You can already try that by taking 4-8 days (depending how many bank holidays are around) out of your 28 days and work for two months 4-days a week. I did so in July and June and it was a blast. From my tests, as long as you manage other people expectations, nobody will notice or care if you’re not there in IT. And it’s not only 4 days of work. It’s also 3 days of rest. It’s obviously for the same reason but still… it does feel more powerful once you feel it on yourself. Distressing is amazing. Once you try you will never want to go back. Tbh I already work 100% remotely with flexible hours I want, and as long as I deliver nobody cares how much I work. Why anyone would? Seriously, who cares? As long as value is delivered: nobody.